Saturday, May 12, 2012

Remember "tights"? Winter tights were like thick socks that little girls wore, but they went all the way up to your tummy instead of just up to your knees. Summer tights were much thinner than winter tights, but still much thicker than the nylons that Grown-Ups (tm) wore.

In recent years I've been noticing "sheer" on the labels of panty hose. Sheer, huh? Aren't they ALL sheer? Apparently not. I finally figured out one of the reasons for the opaque hose: they hide tattoos. (Boy, the things I've learned in the last year.)

Wednesday, May 09, 2012

So there's the active obedience of Christ. He followed rules. He did what He was supposed to do. And there's the passive obedience of Christ. He took the punishment that the law demanded.

You want to make God happy with how you obey the law? You can try and try and try. You can do your darnedest to follow the rules. You might even do a bang-up job of it! But you're not going to do it absolutely totally perfectly, every single day of your life. After all, there was that naughtiness one day when you were learning to crawl, which you might not remember, but your mom will. And what does the law demand for that? Yup, "the wages of sin is death."

So the only way to keep the law would be to spend eternity in hell, if only in payment for those occasional slip-ups. If you don't suffer eternally, then you didn't do what the law demanded, did you? But if you have to spend eternity in hell to fulfill the law's demands, then you can't enjoy God's company in heaven, because you're in hell, and .... oh ... phooey, ... there's just no way to do it!

Exactly.

That's just how STUCK we are when we want to earn heaven. It's an impossibility, an inescapable conundrum.

But with God, all things are possible. Who will set me free from this body of death? Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in our Lord Jesus Christ!

Keeping the law.
It's not just about doing everything right.
It's mainly about living through the punishment.

Monday, May 07, 2012

I guess we'll be buying them this year instead of eating delectable homegrown ones.

After that warm spell in early March, the weather seemed to go into refrigeration mode. My strawberry plants didn't know what to make of it. After lots of pruning away last year, they needed to replenish themselves, but haven't been able to. When I checked the patch today, I saw that the plants were already blooming and quite a few of the strawberry flowers had black middles, which I suspect means they were killed by one of the recent frosts.

The small cherry tree suffered the same fate. It looks pitiful. The larger, older cherry tree blooms later and will probably bear a little. Luckily, the apples haven't bloomed yet.

Y'know, this isn't the solution I was wanting for carpal-tunnel problems that result from hulling strawberries and pitting cherries.

Sunday, May 06, 2012

Death's flood has lost its chillsince Jesus crossed the river.Lover of souls, from illmy passing soul deliver. (LSB 482)

A choir director or a pastor or somebody told me once that this was an allusion to the river Styx. Greek mythology. The place of the dead. Charon ferrying the dead person across.

Really?

But this year it crossed my mind that many aspects of mythology have roots in the truth. Sure, the truth was twisted, sometimes almost beyond recognition. In this case, the truth is that Canaan was the Promised Land to which God was leading the children of Israel. And Canaan is a type of the promised land. As the Israelites were baptized in the crossing of the Red Sea and then spent decades on their pilgrimage, so we are baptized into Christ and then spend our lives on a pilgrimage. They crossed the Jordan River into the promised land. We cross from our earthly pilgrim life into the promised land of heaven. Maybe the Jordan is where the myth of the Styx came from.

So maybe the hymn isn't alluding to the Styx, but maybe the story of the Styx found its beginning in God's story.